January 2012
1 post
4 tags
“The average American loves his family. If he has any love left over for some...”
– Thomas Edison
December 2011
2 posts
7 tags
An even more unfortunate misnomer
Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, Vol.3
Writers used to cite it as a paradox that Ismâ’îl, ruler of ‘Persia’, wrote his verse in Turkic, while his rival, Selîm, ruler of ‘Turkey’, wrote his verse in Persian. The paradox springs only from a misuse of the term ‘Persia’ for the Safavî empire, which...
4 tags
My wife is unhappy
Lyrics to My Wife is Unhappy. A song from Future of the Left’s new EP, Polymers are Forever.
He’d found her on the floor They’d had to sell the sofa The children had departed But beer won’t buy itself
He’d kissed her on the cheek And placed her palms together If furniture is sadness Then he would celebrate her
He’d phoned in sick for years But no-one ever...
November 2011
3 posts
6 tags
Shambling syntax
Terry Eagleton, How to Read a Poem Blackwell, 2007
‘Discourse’, as we shall see, means attending to language in all of its material density, whereas most approaches to poetic language tend to disembody it. Nobody has ever heard language pure and simple. Instead, we hear utterances that are shrill or sardonic, mournful or nonchalant, mawkish or truculent, irascible or histrionic. And...
3 tags
Approximation
An anecdote from Metafilter user range, answering a question about the strong nuclear force and gravity and black holes and apparently freakish coincidences in quantum physics
One of the perks of studying undergrad physics at MIT was taking third-semester quantum mechanics from someone who had an honest-to-god Nobel Prize. He (who shall remain nameless) was doing a test prep session with the...
7 tags
That Obscure Object of Desire
Helen DeWitt published a new short, titled That Obscure Object of Desire, in the Bullet magazine. That link is dead. Here is a reproduction from Google’s webcache:
“Uncertainty and information are the same quantities, the removal of uncertainty being equated with the giving of information.” —Codes and Cryptography by Dominic Welsh
The train stops at Kottbusser Tor. Cement stairs go down. In...
October 2011
2 posts
5 tags
Head Music
Brian Eno, interviewed by Pitchfork’s Mark Richardson November 1, 2010
Pitchfork: You’re credited with “computer” on the album [“Small Craft on a Milk Sea” —F]. There were two things that I read about years ago, when you were speaking about computer music, that might have changed over time. One had to do with the idea of electronic music so often being created...
September 2011
7 posts
4 tags
“Dear Sir, I am in a Madhouse & quite forget your Name or who you are. You...”
– Yours respectfully, John Clare.
5 tags
What does X mean?
Barry Mazur, Visions, Dreams, and Mathematics August 1, 2008
If someone asks us What is X? where X is some mathematical concept, we boldly answer, for we have been well trained in the art of definitions. All the fine articulations of logical structure are at our fingertips. If, however, someone asks us What does X mean? we respond as any human must respond when explaining the meaning of something:...
5 tags
Marx's hemorrhoids
From Troy Jollimore’s review of Mary Gabriel’s new book on Karl Marx’s personal life, Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution
He spent much of his life in poor health and constant pain as a result of various ailments. (One particularly humanizing moment has him writing to Engels that he had had to give up going to the British Museum Reading Room on...
2 tags
“Peace is the problem, not war; war pushes the problems of peace aside, instead...”
– Friedrich Dürrenmatt
5 tags
I truly do and say thank you and again I say thank...
Nick Cave penning a letter to MTV, requesting his removal from their list of candidates for the Best Male Artist award October 21st, 1996
To all those at MTV,
I would like to start by thanking you all for the support you have given me over recent years and I am both grateful and flattered by the nominations that I have received for best male artist. The air play given to both the Kylie Minogue...
3 tags
Ringen Sluttet
Knut Hamsun, The Ring is Closed Souvenir Press, 2010. trans: Robert Ferguson (org. “Ringen Sluttet”, 1936)
Also from this book: Olga
They walked along together as far as the little park, chatting away. By the time they got there they were tired and sat down. Good to sit for a while, next to a little chat there was, by God, nothing as good as a rest. They’re so full of...
3 tags
Olga
Knut Hamsun, The Ring is Closed Souvenir Press, 2010. trans: Robert Ferguson (org. “Ringen Sluttet”, 1936 )
Also from this book: Ringen Sluttet
Let me look at you now, you’re so wonderfully unpainted today, Olga, he said and switched on the ceiling light.
Yes. And it may well be I had my reasons for that, since I knew I was coming on board.
Well I don’t suppose it was for the...
2 tags
Constitutional indolence
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent Oxford World’s Classics, 2008 (org. 1907)
He was too lazy even for a mere demagogue, for a workman orator, for a leader of labour. It was too much trouble. He required a more perfect form of ease; or it might have been that he was the victim of a philosophical unbelief in the effectiveness of every human effort. Such a form of indolence requires, implies, a...
August 2011
7 posts
18 tags
Eudaimonia
Terry Eagleton, The Meaning of Life Oxford, 2007
Also from this book: The postmodernist tortoise
Existentialism & Postmodernists
One reason why modernists like Checkhov are so preoccupied with the possibility of meaninglessness is that modernism is old enough to remember a time when there was still meaning in plenty, or at least so the rumour has it. Meaning was around recently enough for...
3 tags
No one is without Christianity
From an interview with William Faulkner by Jean Stein for the Paris Review New York, 1956
No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by the word. It is every individual’s individual code of behavior, by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol —cross or crescent or whatever— that...
5 tags
Faulkner is fired. (And you are too).
From an interview with William Faulkner by Jean Stein for the Paris Review New York, 1956
I had just completed a contract at MGM and was about to return home. The director I had worked with said, “If you would like another job here, just let me know and I will speak to the studio about a new contract.” I thanked him and came home. About six months later I wired my director friend that I would...
5 tags
General crappiness in the UK
A reader nicknamed JetBlackEvil comments on a The Guardian article titled “If the rioting was a surprise, people weren’t looking” by Stafford Scott about the recent violent riots in the UK:
Listen, these kids aren’t rioting because some guy got shot by a cop. They’re rioting because they’ve had enough and this is the tipping point.
They’ve had enough of...
2 tags
Come Rain or Come Shine
Kazuo Ishiguro, from “Come Rain or Come Shine” inside Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall Faber and Faber, UK, 2009
Also from this book: Crooner
“You know, Emily, Charlie’s a decent guy. A very decent guy. And he loves you. You won’t do better, you know.”
Emily shrugged and drank some more wine.
“You’re probably right. And we’re hardly young any more. We’re as bad as one...
3 tags
Crooner
Kazuo Ishiguro, from “Crooner” inside Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall Faber and Faber, UK, 2009
Also from this book: Come Rain or Come Shine
To be honest, I was now beginning to wonder what I’d got myself into, what this whole serenade thing was about. And these were Americans, after all. For all I knew, when Mr. Gardner started singing, Mrs. Gardner would come to the...
7 tags
The Trouble with Einstein
Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next 2006
My first job after getting my PhD was in 1979 at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton. One of my main reasons for taking it was the hope of making contact with some living legacy of Einstein, who had died twenty-four years earlier. In this I was disappointed. There was no...
July 2011
6 posts
3 tags
12 Angry Men
Roger Ebert, in his review of 12 Angry Men, an early film of the late Sidney Lumet
The visual strategy of the movie is discussed by Lumet in Making Movies, one of the most intelligent and informative books ever written about the cinema. In planning the movie, he says, a “lens plot” occurred to him: To make the room seem smaller as the story continued, he gradually changed to lenses of...
6 tags
Questions for the Movie Answer Man
Roger Ebert, Questions for the Movie Answer Man Andrews McMeel Publishing, 1997
Allan Smithee is nothing more than a pseudonym-a commonly used smokescreen for the identities of filmmakers who, out of embarrassment or protest over the outcome of their work, have chosen to remove their name from the official credits of a given film.
…
Q. How come on the Far and Away movie poster both...
4 tags
Fourth of July
wolframalpha:
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, two US Founding Fathers who signed the US Declaration of Independence, both died on Tuesday, July 4, 1826.
Coincidentally, their death date was also the 50th Anniversary of the United States declaring Independence.
6 tags
“Comrade Members, like fire and fusion, government is a dangerous servant and a...”
– Prof de la Paz from «The Moon is a Harsh Mistress» by Robert Heinlein
5 tags
Your Movie Sucks
Roger Ebert, Your Movie Sucks 2007, Andrews McMeel Publishing
About Anatomy of Hell :
No doubt the truth can be unpleasant, but I am not sure that unpleasantness is the same as the truth.
…
They talk. They speak as only the French can speak, as if it is not enough for a concept to be difficult, it must be impenetrable. No two real people in the history of mankind have ever spoken...
4 tags
Not suicide but the thought of suicide
Roberto Calasso, K. 2006
He replied to Brod with a closely argued letter in which he explained that the only sensible conclusion he had ever reached in his life was ‘not suicide, but the thought of suicide’. If he didn’t go beyond the thought, it was due to a further reflection: ‘You who can’t manage to do anything, you want to do this?’
June 2011
2 posts
3 tags
Mark Twain on the typewriter
Mark Twain, from My Unpublished Autobiography
Some days ago a correspondent sent in an old typewritten sheet, faded by age, containing the following letter over the signature of Mark Twain:
Hartford, March 10, 1875.
Please do not use my name in any way. Please do not even divulge that fact that I own a machine. I have entirely stopped using the typewriter, for the reason that I never could...
3 tags
“…the funeral of Ibn Rushd, which, poignantly, featured a donkey laden with...”
May 2011
5 posts
“…it seems as if one cannot understand anything until one understands...”
– Mark Baker
2 tags
The postmodernist tortoise
Terry Eagleton, The Meaning of Life Oxford, 2007
Also from this book: Eudaimonia
It is also true that human beings, not least because they have language, are capable of objectifying their own existence in a way that tortoises presumably are not. We can speak of something called ‘the human condition’, whereas it is unlikely that tortoises brood under the shelter of their shells on the...
12 tags
Nichts können sie sagen. Still müssen sie sein....
Paul K. Feyerabend, Quantum Theory and Our View of the World inside Physics and Our View of the World, edited by Jan Hilgevoord
When I was a student in Vienna, in the late 1940s, we had three physicists who were known to a wider public: Karl Przibram, Felix Ehrenhaft and Hans Thirring. Przibram was an experimentalist, a pupil of J. J. Thomson whom he often mentioned with reverence. Philosophers...
16 tags
The most simple-minded and most vapid tales
Paul K. Feyerabend, Has the Scientific View of the World a Special Status Compared With Other Views? inside Physics and Our View of the World, edited by Jan Hilgevoord
Is it not really strange, asks Einstein, that human beings are normally deaf to the strongest argument while they are always inclined to overestimate measuring accuracies?
These and similar examples show that science contains...
3 tags
Tears of the Giraffe
Alexander McCall Smith, Tears of the Giraffe (No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, Book 2) Anchor, 2002
‘Some people are slow to give,’ she said. ‘It is something to do with how their mothers brought them up. I have read all about this problem in a book. There is a doctor called Dr. Freud who is very famous and has written many books about such people.’
‘Is he in...
April 2011
2 posts
4 tags
Eunuchs of the Ottoman Empire
John O. Hunwick, Eve Troutt Powell, The African diaspora in the Mediterranean lands of Islam
Making of a eunuch in the Ottoman Empire:
Details of the operation
The operator seizes the penis, the scrotal sacs and the testicles and ties them together tightly with a thin but tough cord. Then, with a single razor stroke, he cuts off everything below the ligature. The huge wound is then covered with...
4 tags
Malwaşa
Şinasi Gündüz, Problems on the Muslim Understanding of the Mandaeans
Every Mandaean [According to Gündüz, the same people as the Sâbians mentioned in the Qur’an as one of the “people of the book” —F.] has two personal names, one is the worldly name and other is the religious (malwaşa) name. The former which is usually an Islamic name is his laqâb, but the malwaşa name is the...
March 2011
1 post
3 tags
Dealing with cats
Patricia Wrede, Enchanted Forest #1: Dealing with Dragons Harcourt Brace, 1990
There were several cats of various sizes and colors perched on the porch railing or lying in the sun. As Cimorene dismounted, Kazul said to one of them, “Would you be good enough to tell Morwen that I’m here and would like to talk to her?” The cat, a large gray torn, blinked its yellow eyes at Kazul....
February 2011
3 posts
2 tags
The dead don’t need anything. The rest of us could...
Elizabeth McCracken, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination: A Memoir Little, Brown and Company, 2008
Also from this book: The dwarfs of grief
As for me, I believe that if there’s a God — and I am as neutral on the subject as is possible — then the most basic proof of His existence is black humor.
Perhaps it goes without saying that I believe in the geographic cure. Of course you...
5 tags
The Disinherited, The Shoe & The 'Allah-free'...
Lesley Hazelton, After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam Doubleday, September 2009
Mısır’da olanlar için “Bu bir Allah-sız devrim!!” diyenlerin anlamadıkları en az iki şey sayabilirim: Devrim, ve Allah. // I can speak of at least two things which those who say that “This is an Allah-free revolution” about what happened in Egypt do...
5 tags
A childish fantasy
Comedian/writer John Rogers on Ayn Rand and Tolkien:
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course,...
January 2011
3 posts
8 tags
Panzer
Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality W. W. Norton & Company, 2010
In the 1890s some of Germany’s leading physicists were obsessively pursuing a problem that had long vexed them: what was the relationship between the temperature, the range of colours, and the intensity of light emitted by a hot iron poker? It seemed a trivial problem compared...
4 tags
The dwarfs of grief
Elizabeth McCracken, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination: A Memoir Little, Brown and Company, 2008
Also from this book: The dead don’t need anything. The rest of us could use some company.
[ after giving birth to a stillbirth son… —F ]
…in the hospital in Bordeaux one of the midwives looked at us and asked a question in French. Most of the calamity (that word...
6 tags
God Is. How Christianity Explains Everything
Douglas Wilson, God Is. : How Christianity Explains Everything American Vision, 2008
See, if interested at all, my review of the book on Goodreads.
At the base of Islam is the well-know confession, “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet.” This defines the fundamentalism of that oppressive and close-minded religion: One authority, and one voice for that authority, anything...
December 2010
1 post
11 tags
Copernicus and the vast chasm of Christian...
David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies Yale University Press, 2009
In any event, Copernicus was heir to a long mathematical tradition and—if he cared to make use of it—a tradition of physical theory that had opened the way to new models of the cosmos. And Copernicus’s contribution, to be honest, must be reckoned rather small, in terms at least...
October 2010
5 posts
3 tags
“I can only describe my feeling by the metaphor, that, if a man could write a...”
– Ludwig Wittgenstein, A Lecture on Ethics
4 tags
The TV Room
David Alarcon, “Second Lives” The New Yorker, Aug 16, 2010
Full story available online here
Francisco left Birmingham that October, and only later did we find out why: one afternoon Marisa skipped her S.A.T. prep class, and Mrs. Villanueva came home early to find them groping in the downstairs television room. For me, the most astonishing aspect of the story was undoubtedly the idea...
3 tags
Norwegian Wood
Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood (org. Normeei no Marl) The Harvill Press, 2000. Translator: Jay Rubin (org. Kodansha, Tokyo, 1987)
True, he had a sarcastic side that often struck people as arrogant, but in fact he was a considerate and fairminded person. He would distribute his remarks and jokes fairly to Naoko and to me, taking care to see that neither of us felt left out. If one or the other...
6 tags
'Sexy' without the sex
Voyou Desoeuvre, “Sexy,” in quotes 05 10 2010. Full article here
I read somewhere that, when Hugh Heffner first set up Playboy, he intended it solely as a lifestyle magazine, introducing men to fashion, interior design, culture, and other signifiers of the high life. The naked women, supposedly, were added when publishers were worried that a magazine about clothes and furniture would be...
5 tags
Domates
Feriye Lokantası’ndan Vedat Başaran Radikal röportajı, 2003
Tencere yemeği Osmanlı’dan gelme değil mi? Nereden çıkmış?
Domatese bağlı ama yine de aslında siyasi erke bağlı. Domatesi siyasi erk getirebiliyor. Ama süreç içinde fakir toplumun ana temalarından biri olarak ortaya çıkıyor. Siyasi erk süngerimsi ekmeği Fransız metodundan alıp Hünkar Sofrası adıyla Türk somun ekmeği diye...